Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily agree with the author. Her suggestions for how to get early users are all good ones, and by all means, do them all if you can! Except producthunt -- that one's a rigged vote with its own secret influencers. Google around, you'd be surprised how deep the rabbit hole goes!

But back to my point: there's nothing wrong with trying some Google or Facebook ads. Don't spend too much up front! Google will try to get you to broadly target a bunch of generic words. You should resist that pressure and use their keyword research tool to home in on specific phrases that your potential customers often search for.

Once you have your phrases, just put in $500 and see what happens. If you pick up a handful of customers who pay you $1000 over the next 6 months, then you're golden! Put in $5,000 next time and see if you can turn it into $10,000. Honestly, this kind of thing works for some businesses and people end up dumping as much as they can into ads. Don't ignore this strategy just because it's not as "sincere" or "personal" or something.

[Edit] Fixed author pronoun.

Yeah the producthunt head nod was weirdly out of place. It's rife with faked/influenced votes and gives little penetration to actual users.

If you want users just find the people who have the problem you're trying to solve.

I used to run AdWords regularly. I knew I'd be onto something when I almost broke even. Sometimes I'd be in the hole a bit and that was fine. If I broke even on first attempt, I knew I had a winner. This was affiliate marketing btw. Once I broke even, it was a matter of tweaking, refining, testing and more refining until you're in the green.

That being said, I think it's obvious that I totally disagree with the author. You should run ads. Absolutely. If you get a paid customer right away, that in itself is a much stronger indicator than someone signing up for a freemium product. I find this article carefully crafted to to be somewhat controversial, perhaps on purpose so it reaches the front page of HN. Mission accomplished. Congrats!

I think you're being unfair to product hunt. I've launched two sites on there - one was the product of the day (www.uploader.win) and the other one in top 5 and I don't know anyone there.

I even created my profile on the same day and yet it was so well received. Got a lot of paying users as well. Maybe there are some people who try to game the system (just like there are people on HN too) but I wouldn't make them generalization since my experience has been very good on PH.

Here are a few citations for what I'm talking about[1][2]. My objection is not that some people try to game the system, but that the system was secretly rigged from the start. There is a group of curators -- VCs, startup advisers, journalists, important founders and the like -- who get to jump the queue and post directly onto the top of the front page of ProductHunt. The majority of front-page posts came from these curators, and the "upcoming" section is nothing more than a pool from which they can hand-pick submissions. It's a bit like Slashdot pretending to be Hacker News.

According to [1], many founders have taken on "advisers" with curator privileges, giving them a little bit of equity in return for the publicity.

Hacker News is nothing like that. Although your social group can help you promote things here, there's no startup adviser that I can give 0.5% ownership to in return for bypassing the voting queue.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875

[2] https://www.recode.net/2015/6/18/11563670/product-hunt-the-s...

Counter argument: Producthunt brought me about 6k users for Nugget. I don’t know anyone that works there. No affiliation. But I do think Nugget is a very good fit for the crowd.

nugget DOT one? Well, if producthunt and your product have a lot in common, then it's a great place. It's easy to sell bibles outside a church.

Shouldn’t it be pretty _hard_ to sell bibles to people that probably already have one? (Or is this just a traditional saying I don’t know?)

There are so many different translations that it should be pretty easy to get people to buy a second and third bible. There are also study versions that crosslink verses on the same topic (e.g. if you want to read all there is to read about angels), and then of course there are versions with commentary.

I have at least a dozen if not two dozen bibles. As another commentator mentioned there's many translations, I've got mostly English Bibles, but I do speak Spanish as well, so I have some Spanish ones, one Hebrew (Old Testament / Tanakh only) and a Greek one too.

So it wouldn't be too hard depending on the purpose of the Bible (is it a study bible? or a new translation, what is the focus of this translation? etc). It could also be a gift for somebody else. I've gifted a good number of bibles, even ones I absolutely loved.

The people outside a church might already have bibles, but they're also a community shown to have an interest in bibles. Even if they already have them, they're still likely to have more interest in getting more than the general population as a whole.

On the other hand, trying to sell bibles outside a synagogue is probably not going to get you a lot of success.

Here's how I think about it. Those early users you buy will almost certainly be unprofitable on a unit basis, because you don't yet have product-market fit.

Thus buying users won't scale at first, but it's OK (even recommended) to do things that won't scale early on. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

So go ahead and buy ads if it helps you get started, but if the ads aren't making a profit right away, think about how to find a path to growth that does scale.

Personally I'd find in-person sales and cold out-reach much more annoying than simple ads (as a potential user). Not sure if that's common.

For every best practice, there's an exception.

The best thing is to know your business and choose a strategy that works well for it.

_her_

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